Deceptive, opportunistic policies – aided by dogmatic and profitable disinformation – are increasingly reflected in the reckless, interrelated actions of elected officials and corporate leaders. Collectively, these exploitative measures, camouflaged and prolonged by the false rationalizations used to justify them, are worsening long-term environmental and financial predicaments, imposing unjust threats on American citizens, compounded by hastening global ecological instability.
Such deceptions abound in the unprecedented, lawless actions of Elon Musk in his unchecked dismantling of federal programs, disguised as alleged goals of the Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE], done in covertly attempting to compensate for $4.5 trillion in Trump's tax-cuts, which will primarily benefit the wealthy. Americans are critically dependent on services provided by the programs under attack, including life-sustaining healthcare and medications. Although there is little dispute about the virtues of reducing waste and fraud, the greatest fraud of all is portraying Musk’s brazenly illegal ‘chainsaw massacre’ of agency staffing and operating funds as if it were the precise and accountable surgical approach required for legitimate auditing.
As Congressional representative Betty McCollum has observed, “Elon Musk is a private citizen with massive foreign debts, countless conflicts of interest, and unknown personal motivations that disqualify him from serving in the federal government.” Aside from these exasperating facts, consider that Musk has benefitted from at least $38 billion in federal contracts, grants, and tax credits. Without such massive government support, Musk’s enterprises wouldn’t exist, and his enormous wealth accumulation wouldn’t have been possible. Yet, it is his wealth that has given Musk the highly-disputed, woefully unjust and illegitimate political power enabling him to make drastic, unjustified staffing and budget cuts in federal programs that either threaten his interests or don't favor them. His self-serving motives are widely reported and legal grounds for immediately suspending DOGE incursions until a legitimate investigation of them can be conducted – if that is even possible within institutions so vulnerable to transactional incentives and penalties.
Among programs being dangerously weakened by Musk’s DOGE are those of NOAA and FEMA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency). Both agencies provide services essential to many Americans, foremost those living in areas vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding, like coastal Georgia. Without the ability to predict weather, facilitate emergency evacuations, and conduct recovery operations, people harmed by major storms will suffer unjust, life-changing penalties that until now have been minimized by tax-dollars spent on these programs that are now under attack. As evidenced by Hurricane Helene last year, the services of these agencies are now urgently needed far beyond coastal areas, as major storms take unprecedented toll hundreds of miles inland.
DOGE subversion of EPA programs also severely threatens Americans' health and quality of life by attempting to weaken or block enforcement of regulatory requirements protecting air and water quality. Furthermore, efforts to unlawfully eliminate such safeguards are provoking legal actions to oppose them, which are certain to further delay projects that must be environmentally reviewed under existing law. This litigation and related legal policy disputes, combined with the economic turmoil caused by massive cutbacks in federal jobs and critical public services, will create a tsunami of costly and harmful disruptions surging across all sectors.
Most reckless is the Trump Administration’s astoundingly defiant rejection of science through the denial of climate change by proclaiming it as a hoax to defend Big Oil’s continued profiteering. Meanwhile, heat-trapping fossil-fuel emissions are increasingly compounding the property damage and fatalities caused by multi-billion-dollar extreme-weather catastrophes.
Estimated damages related to such events are nearly $3 trillion since 1980, about a third of them within just the past five years due to accelerating climate-disrupting combustion of fossil-fuels. Likewise, the number of major events last year was triple the annual average over that 45-year period. It is no coincidence that because NOAA prepares, evaluates, and publicizes these estimates, the agency is now a prime DOGE target, driven by those who profit from dirty-energy disinformation and public officials who are obligated to them.